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Saturday, April 26, 2008

Striking Teachers.

With teaching unions trying to blackmail the government into giving teachers a further inflation busting pay rise (they are up 19% in real terms since a decade ago), by striking as pupils are preparing for their exams it is clear that the power of the Unions has grown too great once more. Seeing as the Unions are willing to wreck the life chances of the children in their care it is important for pupils and parents to be able to assess how at risk they are from this. So how about making it compulsory for schools to publish information pertaining to the trade union affiliation of their staff?

I'm not talking about naming individual teachers but just a brief summary of how many unreliable teachers a school has, so that if one school has 10% NUT affiliation and a second suffers from 50% NUT affiliation then the children and their parents are able to choose the school least likely to suffer from maliciously timed stoppages.

As someone who was at primary school 20 years ago when the last wave of teaching strikes was underway I can clearly remember that the most militant teachers were generally also the most dim, useless and bullying, one of the militant teachers told my mother that she became a socialist when she failed the 11+ which figures. I doubt that much has happened in the intervening two decades to change that.